March 26, 2010
Not Dead Yet? The Fate of Regional Newspapers
On March 25, 2010, I delivered what I thought was a reasonably sensitive presentation on the current state and possible future of the regional newspaper, and the current utility of newspaper advertising, to the New York Capital Region Chapter of the American Marketing Association (NYCRAMA). The audience – which I found upon my arrival included 20 or so employees of the Albany Times Union, a Hearst product and our region’s regional newspaper – did not entirely enjoy my brusque prognosis, delivered (at least to their ears) with all the charm of Dr. House.
Many challenged my assumptions and my data. Several approached me afterward to suggest I didn’t know what was going on, or of all the efforts underway within the paper – blogging, youth outreach, new community focus, alternate revenue ideas (like charging for the weekly TV listing), online advertising efforts, etc. – that were working to slow the revenue slide and allow the “paper” to transition to a new era.
Perhaps.
It is certainly a too easy thing to say that the regional newspaper is dead. In fact, I’ve heard that the Times Union has the most highly trafficked website in the region (though I wonder how it compares to Google). I also know that community newspapers have in some cases bottomed out, and a few are even experiencing subscription growth.
How right or wrong was I to say the regional newspaper is on life support and will not survive? Or will not survive in anything close to the form we know it?
Whether or not you were at my presentation, I’d love to know your opinion and ideas. Will there be physical newspapers 10 years from now? Will regional newspaper brands be able to maintain their authority as they move more and more online? Will the iPad save them all?
For the record, I’m a friendly. Like many who came to consciousness in a pre-Internet world, I am unsettled by the trends. I hang on to my newspaper subscriptions (yes, I have two!), and defend the form as a unique way to consume information. I enjoy the act of spreading the news before me. Moving my coffee and buttered bagel off the page to turn it. And taking the news with me wherever I, uh, go.
But I am in a fast-dwindling minority.
An admittedly non-scientific survey of 50 of my fellow employees highlights the terrible trend. Only 37% still subscribe to a physical regional paper. And as low as that number is, there is an even starker stat buried in the data: while fully 72% of my coworkers 40 and older take a paper, only 18% of those younger than 40 do. And only 9%, or one out of 11, of those under 30 do.
And when you ask the under-40s if they are likely to subscribe in the future, they either laugh or just look at you quizzically.
How do subscription numbers break down regionally? By income? Education? Propensity to purchase the goods advertised? I don’t know. But even accounting for a monstrous margin of error, the numbers do not suggest a healthy future.
If you were George Randolph Hearst III, Vice President, Associate Publisher and General Manager of the Times Union, what would you do?
Now, be nice.
Posted in Conversation Mining and Surveys, Social Marketing
Tagged AMA, american marketing association, community newspapers, Dr. House, George Randolph Hearst III, Hearst, newspaper advertising, newspaper subscriptions, NYCRAMA, regional newspapers, Times Union
15 Responses to Not Dead Yet? The Fate of Regional Newspapers
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SURVEY DETAILS:
Total responses: 51
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Subscribe to at least a Sunday paper: 19 or 37%
Subscribed in their adult lives: 34 or 66% (8 dropped in the last 5 years)
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Subscribers by partner status:
Single: 42%
Partnered: 36%
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By age bracket
20 – 29 1/11 or 9%
30 – 39 5/22 or 23%
40 – 49 9/13 or 69%
50+ 4/5 or 80%
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Though not a large or very representative sample, these numbers do square with national surveys. The percentage of US households that subscribe to a paper is said to be 50%. But that number has been dropping for decades, and saw a full 10% drop in 2009.
I think that if we’re discussing the survival of actual physical newspapers – and not just the content – there has to be a shift to a more local focus. Running wire story after wire story isn’t helping their cause. You need local features, local news, local reporting… Anything else is basically just re-purposing content that is widely available for free on the internet.
How would I save the regional newspaper? I would turn more of it over to the populi. Devote more space, maybe entire chunks of each section, to reader-generated articles and photos. Truly local, authentic, by and for the people.
Poynter Institute ethicist Kelly McBride was visiting former colleagues at the Spokane Spokesman-Review last summer, when the conversation slid into the how-bad-is-it? mode. It has gotten so bad, one journalist said, that the independent contractors who deliver the paper are complaining that the Monday edition doesn’t have enough throw-weight to get all the way up the porch.
-from the 2010 State of the News Media
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/newspapers_audience.php
Scroll down to the chart. I see dead people.
It seems inevitable that newspapers like the Times Union are going to morph into media outlets, distributed mainly online. The Kindle and iPad are providing a new platform for traditional media to use. Plus, I think some people would pay for the content – but at greatly reduced rates compared to current old media pricing.
The print edition may survive as a Sunday weekly – while distribution of daily papers continues to fall, the number of Sunday editions sold is holding steady – or even rising for some papers.
This is am interesting discussion. I suppose I’ll just offer my two cents from a personal perspective—which seems to mirror national and regional trends.
I tend to agree that the Sunday will live on—nothing better than a lazy Sunday morning drinking coffee and a big Sunday New York Times (Sorry TU).
I used to read the newspaper cover to cover every single day, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I bought a print edition of any paper—including the NYT.
I read several papers online every day and the reason for switching is not because I don’t want to spend the money. I would consider a paid digital subscription as tablets such as ipad are rolled out and offer a better experience.
Speaking of subscriptions, the people from the TU who repeatedly offer their free subscriptions at Price Chopper for a chance to win a shopping spree are doing nothing to further their cause IMO.
I’m not trying to slam the TU; I do read it online and give them a lot of respect in terms of some of their content and the changes they’ve been looking to implement in order to evolve.
But I resent that they seldom take “no thank you” for an answer, and it makes me associate their paper as something of little value.
This article from Mashable won’t make anyone feel any better. http://mashable.com/2010/03/26/the-dire-state-of-the-newspaper-industry-stats/
Hi Ron. You were the bearer of inevitable news. Read last week that newspaper ad revenue nationally declined by almost half in four years. The writing’s on the wall, but soon not on newsprint! We subscribe to several newspapers, both regional and national, but only the Kindle editions. Canceled our print entirely. Newspaper branded content will be distributed on line and via social media solely in the not too distant future, in my view, except for the occasional Sunday print. The real question: how does really good journalism survive all this? What’s ITS business model?
Irony alert. The Times Union featured Media Logic (Dave, Suzanne and me) this Sunday. http://bit.ly/avTpSH
My 87-year old mother called, almost in tears, to tell me how proud she was to see me in the paper. These regional brands still mean a lot to some folks.
Regional newspapers need to be more relevant to their audience (so, like Scott and Jim said, much more local) and more realistic about what their value-add is.
Newspapers have always been *primarily* aggregators of information, with some original content and analysis thrown in. So much focus is put on the value of enterprise reporting and investigative journalism, though, that many people–and especially the news media themselves–forget about their roots as reporters and curators of content that other people created.
Case in point: most local content originates not with original reporting, but with an announcement (generally in the form of a press release) from a state or local government agency, a local business, a school or law enforcement. readMedia recently studied 5 daily papers in the region and at least 50% of the local, non-sports news started off as a press release.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. Most day-to-day news is simply a statement of fact: GE is opening a new R&D facility, the Tax Department busted a local guy for tax fraud, a school is hosting a national speaker. What *is* bad, from the future-of-newspapers perspective, is the amount of time, energy and money that the media spends rewriting these press releases in the interests of “journalism”.
In the future, successful local news media will look to organizationally created content (in the form of press releases, video and blogs) as one of the types of local news that they will aggregate and comment on. Those media will be transparent about where the news comes from, add context and analysis where necessary, and will stop making a fetish of rewriting press sent to them by their former colleagues who are now in PR.
Great comments. Find myself nodding with a lot of the above but need to broaden Ron’s “folk” group above … Two of the twenty-somethings I recently met with hit my email inbox first thing Monday with mention of reading about ML in the Sunday paper. Im pretty sure they had inky fingertips and flipped pages.
Regarding the iPad … it may or may not be the savior of what we call “traditional media.” Check out this quote from Andrew Leonard’s Salon post “People will use it, but more for their own purposes than for the likes of the New York Times or Wired.” Article — http://bit.ly/dCSPw5
Here’s an interesting article talking about “How an ad-man-turned publisher is building a local news empire profitably in Texas”
http://www.hurl.ws/dkzl
The local paper, the Albany Times Union, just posted a subscription deal on Groupon (screen cap). Brilliant or desperate? Time will tell.